One of Picasso’s most important Cubist works, Femme Assise (1909), will go under the hammer next month at Sotheby’s London (21 June, Impressionist and Modern art evening sale). The painting has been consigned by a private collector who acquired it at auction in 1973 at Sotheby’s in London.
Helena Newman, the global co-head of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art department, says: “It is several decades since a Cubist painting of this calibre has been offered at auction, since virtually all the significant works of this period are in international museums and institutions.” Femme assise, she says, “is one of the artist’s greatest masterpieces to be sold in a generation”.
The estimate is available upon request, though a Sotheby’s spokeswoman says that the auction house is expecting “a price in excess of £30m”. Last May, Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O, 1955), set a record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction, fetching $179.4m at Christie’s New York.
Femme Assise, painted in the remote Spanish village of Horta de Ebro in the summer of 1909, is based on Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier. Only two years earlier, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the work depicting five prostitutes which is often cited as one of the most influential works of the 20th century.
Janie Cohen, a Picasso expert who is the director of the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, says: “This is indeed a big deal to see this early Cubist work come onto the market... The palette of the painting reflects the palette of the Spanish countryside, as well as of Cézanne’s late landscapes painted in Provence. The limited but bright palette would become more subdued and monochromatic as Cubism developed.”
Femme Assise will go on show in Sotheby’s New York from 16 May, in the Hong Kong branch from 26 to 30 May, and in London from 10 June prior to the evening auction.
